galway - anti circus pickets

galway | animal rights | news report

Wednesday April 05, 2006 16:07

by h.

greg at empatia dot pl

Or to be more precise - against animal abuse in circuses

circus ozzz

This weekend Galway was visited by two circuses, both using animals in their shows, so we decided to do some actions against it. Few days before their arrival flyers about the pickets were spread on alternative gigs and in places that we hoped to get in touch with other animal rights activists, but as we were gathering at our meeting point it was already obvious that there was nobody more than our friends, so we ended up with 5 to 7 people protesting (depending on day and houre of the show) in which we had; Poles, French and New Zealand but no Irish.

On the first day we were threatened to have our legs broken, be beaten up, thrown in to the sea, heard a series of arguments against our animal abuse ones - “go back to Poland”, “Stop taking our jobs”, “go and find a job” [???] - all at the “two ring american circus” which btw. has “three ring” banner on tent and is owned by an irish, with irish staff. As we were pushed out of the grounds rented by the circus and told that the whole town is owned by them ( with threats between that) we awaited the gardai called in by animal rights inspector who was also kicked out (nearly literally). As the circus owner informed us that his brother-in-low is some ubercommander cop, so the only thing that they did was to have a nice chat with the circus staff, taking tickets for the next show (I didn't see that personally) and threatening to get us arrested if we do anything.
The second circus on this day – “Circus Ozzz” appeared to be more civilised – some artists went out to say hi, one took our leaflet to read it, not to immediately throw it away as they usually do... the same gardai already informed them about the dangerous activists doing pickets, so they didn't really bother.

On Sunday the situation was quite similar – ring circus staff threatening us, and trying to turn people against us - two of them stood before our picket, approached people nervously repeating “this way to the circus, this way please...” as something dangerous was happening, with circus owner repeating something by the tube mounted on his 4x4 (nothing interesting because he noticed that we were trying to record him the day before), so besides hearing some more about his 7-brother-in-laws living in this city and us landing in the sea we didn't hear anything interesting. After moving to the second circus we had a small arguement with two guys working with the posters, with usual arguments (go back to poland, when there are 6 poles working in this circus :) and one of us heard that he would end on the ground in two minutes if he didnt go away ( that guy had trained in martial arts from when he was a small kid, so that would have been funny :) )

A couple of families having chatted with us and reading our info refused to go to the circuses, and as usual that was the last circus show that many of the people will go to ( animal rights organisations get lots of letter from people who got the leaflet just before the show, and after the show decide not to go to the circus anymore). We were approached by many people with information about how bad the conditions were for some of the animals ( mostly at the “... ring circus”).

None of the two local newspapers (Galway Advertiser and Galway Independent) wanted to write about our protests, probably they were to busy printing out invitations to the circuses....

Together there were 6 polish, 4 french and one new zealand activist – where were the irish ones?

http://circuses.com
http://empatia.pl